"Being at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has been a very rewarding experience. There is a continuous stream of interesting challenges and great people to work with in order to address these challenges," says Mario Berges, a CMU assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and recent College of Engineering graduate.

The support of PITA funding in the beginning years of Berges' doctoral program at CMU helped give his advisors, Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Lucio Soibelman and H. Scott Matthews, the ability to fund his doctoral research. As a Ph.D. student, Berges' work focused primarily on developing a framework for enabling detailed energy-awareness in buildings through minimally-intrusive approaches. Soibelmen says of the PITA funding: "this seed money allowed the research project to obtain subsequent funding from Robert Bosch LLC to develop the first prototype and funding from the National Science Foundation."

Now Berges calls Soibelman and Matthews his colleagues, and together, they continue to find solutions to critical infrastructure problems in Pennsylvania and beyond. As a CMU faculty member, "I am more generally interested in instrumenting our civil infrastructure to increase its resilience, adaptiveness, and self-monitoring capabilities," describes Berges.

Mario explains that "the projects I have been involved with have drawn the attention of local companies. For example, I have been working closely with the Robert Bosch LLC Research and Technology Center, and my research has assisted in instrumenting the assisted living homes that McKeesport-based company Blueroof Technologies provides."

More generally, though, Berges believes that "the research I am doing has an impact on the way we, in general, use and think about energy consumption in buildings."